jonchoo: Nokia N97 Mini camera samples and review

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Nokia N97 Mini camera samples and review

The N97 Mini features the same camera module as the Nokia N97. The lens here are branded as Carl Zeiss, though I suspect that Nokia are simply licensing the brand. Still who am I to know. Anyway...

The camera here is a 5MP auto focus module with macro capability. Like the N97, the camera application isn't intuitive to use and is slow to boot and explore around. You do get some form of manual control in the form of ISO adjustment (labelled as 'Low', 'Medium' and 'High'), white balance control, sharpness, contrast, colour tone and exposure, though you can't manually control the shutter speed. Three resolutions are supported: 5MP, 2MP and VGA. And like any modern Nokia smartphones, co-ordinates can also be embedded onto images and videos in the form of GPS geo-tagging. There is also a dual LED flash module, which is clearly separated from the lens by a raised frame, so none of the flash bleeding malarkey here as suffered by plenty of N97 owners.

Here are some unedited photographs taken with the Nokia N97 Mini. Unfortunately Blogger does not support resolutions as high as 5MP, so these are resized to 1024x768 resolution. Apart from that they are essentially untouched, and will give you an idea of what to expect from the N97 - as far as the camera goes. While certainly no match for my G9 and modern digital compacts, it is good enough to be used as a quick snapper - as long as there is sufficient natural light source. It works well at picking up low light but suffers from loss of detail due to the way N97 Mini process the image. Macro performance is pretty good, just like the N97. Flash performance is reasonable, but do try not to use it as much, even if it is an improvement over the N97 (again, no bleeding here).